


Blood Writing

by DeCarabas



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M, Solas Greatly Disapproves, Vallaslin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-04
Updated: 2015-10-04
Packaged: 2018-04-24 20:37:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4934410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeCarabas/pseuds/DeCarabas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His face is bare like a child’s, disconcerting, and sometimes Lavellan imagines how the lines of the vallaslin might frame his eyes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blood Writing

His face is bare like a child’s, disconcerting, and sometimes Lavellan imagines how the lines of the vallaslin might frame his eyes.

She traces gentle curls across his brow. Her first love had been a halla keeper, marked for Ghilan’nain. He’d been quiet and uncertain, skittish as his charges, but he’d held his tongue properly when the Keeper tapped the blood writing into his skin. She’d thought there was something of that skittishness in Solas at first, slouching and politely deferential. He’s lost that somewhere along the way. But she leans in, and he leans away.

She wants June’s heavy shadows over his lids, darkening those laughing eyes. He would stay silent through the pain, she thinks, eyes closed while the Keeper worked; he’d sit still and never flinch, but it would be for the wrong reasons. His own determination would keep him motionless, not his devotion to the clan. They’d taken in city elves before, taught them to earn their vallaslin late in life, but she can’t see Solas following in those footsteps. He bears the marks of too much time spent on his own, depending only on himself. In that, maybe he really is still a child.

He loses a friend and his grief looks like rage, and she sees him covered in the shades of Elgarn’nan, demanding nothing less than complete transformation. He transforms the walls of the rotunda around him, claims his own space instead of joining the others in the library above, placing himself squarely in the center of a crossroads but carrying on with his business alone. He asks for very little. It’s another reminder that he’s not truly her clan, for all the hours they’ve spent traveling the countryside, walking through the ancient ruins of their shared people. It’s hard to get to know someone who asks for so little.

He speaks softly in those ruins, distantly, if he's not drawn back to the present by the others' chatter, and he often lapses into silence completely. In those halls, with the weight of history palpable in the air around her, she’s just as comfortable to be left to her own thoughts; but afterwards, she wonders where his thoughts were taking him. She traces the scar above his eyes and wonders where it came from. It would distort Mythal’s branching lines, just slightly. He tells many stories, but none about himself.

She sees Dirthamen’s fine line over the curve of his cheekbone, flattering the planes of his features, hinting at long years spent wandering the paths of the Beyond. Yes, Dirthamen’s vallaslin would suit him best, she thinks. But Dirthamen was drawn to his twin soul, and those markings are a promise, not just of secrets and knowledge, but of coming home to family at last.

When she kisses him, she traces her thumb over his cheek, tracing the bare skin where a promise should be.


End file.
